Note: This applies to Office 2007 installed on Microsoft Windows XP .
If you are using Microsoft Vista please see open Excel 2007 worksheets in different windows on Vista

In Microsoft Office 2007 there has been many changes, like the ribbon for example.

One of the changes that is actually very troublesome for many users is how Microsoft Office 2007 documents are opened by default. For example, if you click on a Microsoft Word 2007 document, the document will open in its open Window. Then if you click on another Microsoft Word 2007 document, again the Microsoft Word 2007 document will open in its own window.

In Microsoft Excel 2007, if you click on multiple Microsoft Excel 2007spreadsheets, they will open in the same window. Incidentally, in Microsoft Outlook 2007, it will also open one Window of Microsoft Outlook 2007. If you right click on the Microsoft Outlook 2007 shortcut and remove the /recycle command line argument, that will force Microsoft Outlook 2007 to open multiple instances of Microsoft Outlook 2007 into separate windows.

(this on XP operating systems only, please go here is you are using Vista)
Continuing on with Microsoft Excel 2007, there are two ways to get around this issue.

The long way: You can click on Start, All Programs, etc. and launch Microsoft Excel 2007 multiple times. Then within each Microsoft Excel 2007 Window, you can open up the Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet of your liking. However, this is a lot of work just to open two or more windows containing separate Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheets.

I prefer to double click on a Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet and have Microsoft Excel 2007 launch a separate window for each Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet that I open. In order to force Microsoft Excel 2007 to open separate windows for each spreadsheet that you double click on, do the following:

1. Open my computer
2. Click on Tools, then Folder Options
3. Select the File Types tab
4. scroll down to the XLS extension
5. select advanced
6. Select open
7. Select Edit…
8. in the line that says "Application used to perform action:" ,
   go to the end of the line and add "%1"
   (that would be %1 within double quotes) so for example it may read something like
   "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE" /e "%1"
9. uncheck Use DDE
10. Do not make any other changes
11. Click ok and click OK again
    (note if you go back into advanced and back into the open action, you will notice DDE is checked again, however the DDE message is blank; this is fine.)
12. Now scroll down to XLSX
13. repeat steps 5 through 11 above
14. Click on Close
15. Now, when you click on Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheets, they will open separate windows for each Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet that is launched.

note: Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet windows will open on top of eachother, so you will have to drag the windows in order to see them.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under Microsoft Office.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.